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: THE CREATIVE INSPIRATION : In some ways I see this paper as a continuation of the paper I delivered in 1990 at the ABS Conference that year in Perth on “The Inner Life and the Environment”. It is a continuation of that paper in the sense that what I want to stress here in this paper is the same thing I stressed in that 1990 paper: the inner lifer and private character. For it is here that ‘the creative inspiration’ finds its origins. I can’t begin in a better place than quoting what the Guardian wrote , a section of his writings that has gained in strength and meaning as the decades have continued since his death in 1957: : Not by the force of numbers, not by the mere exposition of a set of new and noble principles, not by an organized campaign of teaching - no matter how worldwide and elaborate in its character - not even by the staunchness of our faith or the exaltation of our enthusiasm, can we ultimately hope to vindicate in the eyes of a critical and sceptical age the supreme claim of the Abha Revelation. One thing and only one thing will unfailingly and alone secure the undoubted triumph of this sacred Cause, namely, the extent to which our own inner life and private character mirror forth in their manifold aspects the splendor of those eternal principles proclaimed by Baha'u'llah. : (Shoghi Effendi: Baha'i Administration, Page: 66) : The creative inspiration is clearly connected in manifold ways with this “inner life and private character.” Before we begin to examine the inner life and creative inspiration, though, I’d like to say a few things about ‘where I am coming from.’ What are the origins of my own creative inspiration, what are some of the perspectives that inform it, in relation to poetry, one of the many outward forms, manifestations, of this creative imagination, inspiration, the inner spiritual powers? There are several sources and perspectives which illustrate something of what I want to say about my own creative inspiration. : Firstly, there are the influences of socialization. Both my mother in the 1950s and my grandfather in the 1920s, began to write extensively in the late forties and fifties. My father had an immense energy and drive. The two sides of my life, as represented by my parents, I think have played a role, partly undefineable, in whatever inspiration has come into my life in poetry. : Secondly, there is the influence of my religion which I have been a member of now for forty years and attending various functions for forty six. A poetic literature, a long line of artistic and intellectually endowed connections, listening to people talk and talking with from an infinitely wide range of paths in life, an exposure to books, to reading, to hearing peoople read, to reading myself in public,visible commitments, etc. These and other aspects of my connection with the Baha’i Faith have all contributed to defineable and indefinaeable influences on my creative inspirations. : In this connection I’d like to mention the invocation Ya Baha’u’l-Abha which means “O Glory of the All-Glorious” and which ‘Abdu’l-Baha says “is more profit to thee than all knowledge of the sciences and all the wealth of the earth. It is....the melody of eternity...that cry that brings the Supreme Concourse to the door of thy life...It holds all there is of substance in the world of creative thought.”(source unknown) : Thirdly, ill-health and personal difficulties: manic-depression in the 1960s and 1970s, divorce, employment difficulties which turned me toward seeking special inspiration. By 1980 I frequently read the following piece from Gleanings(p.161) and sought the intercession of the departed Hands of the Cause on my behalf: : The soul that hath remained faithful to the Cause of God and stood : unwaiveringly firm in His Path shall, after his ascension, be : possessed of such power that all the worlds which the Almighty : hath created can befefit through him. Such a soul provideth, at the : bidding of the Ideal King and Divine Educator, the pure leven that : leveneth the world of being, and furnisheth the power through : which the arts and wonders of the world are made manifest. : I began writing poetry about a year or so after reading this piece of the Writings frequently. Although I saw no connection between these words and my first poems, by the 1990s I began to wonder at the possible connection with my poetic output and these leavening influences. : Fourth, the influence of other poets: Roger White in the 1980s and the western intellectual tradition since Wordsworth. For a dozen years, 1981 to 1992, I had ‘company defined by letters’, company with the most delightful letter writer I’ve ever known and a poet whose influences has had primacy.(Robert Creeley, The American Poetry Review, Sept.’99, p.18.). : In the years 1993 to 1999 my poetic friends were in books. I read dozens and dozens of books about poetry since Wordsworth started writing in the 1780s. I read publicly in cafes, restaurants, in colleges and at Baha’i functions but did not find it inspirational, although people enjoyed my reading due to my ability to entertain. But I had tired of the public domain after nearly thirty years of teaching and endless firesides, LSA meetings and what seemed like an endless variety of meetings. I had dried up. Poetry functioned like a new lease on life. : Fifth, the possible influence of the holy year, 1992-1993. My Baha’i life had occupied the span between the two holy years, the other being 1952-1953. I think this influence is most mysterious. But my life as a Baha’i had spanned these two special years and a flood of poetry was unleashed after this forty year hiatus. : Sixth, the particular view of time, space and history in the Baha’i teachings. Time: 13.6 billion years; space: infinite, a general scientific view; and history, a ten stage process(Shoghi Effendi, 1953, Chicago) with plans, eras, cycles, epochs, stages, phases, the Baha’i calendar, all of this helped to give my life, my age and all of history a new focus and this plays a role in my poetry. : You will see from the above influences something of that inner life which I speak of and something of the creative inspiration which is at the centre of this topic, this discussion today. And my poetry tells a great deal about my inner life; indeed, I often feel quite exposed in giving my poems to people. : I have provided for those who attend the workshop on poetry some essays and some interviews, as well as some twenty poems, which attempt in their different ways to illustrate something of both the inner life and the creative inspiration. I’d like to quote from some of this material in closing and then we can conclude with some discussion on this paper. : I’ll read several quotations from two of these essays and several of the questions and answers from the interviews I have included and let the poems speak for themselves(include two for the formal ABS paper). Then offer a comment or two on each answer. : TWO ESSAYS: SOURCE MATERIAL FOR PAPER : : POETRY AS A SOURCE OF SOCIAL GOOD : If these booklets of poetry, some twenty-seven now,** help to establish nothing else it will be my search for a context in which relevant fundamental questions about the undoubted right of the individual to self-expression, the societal need for legitimate and just authority and our need as individuals for solid thinking about the organic change in the very structure of society that the world has been preparing for but has not yet experienced—can be examined. In thirty-two hundred poems, an extensive corpus, this search for a context for the examination of fundamental questions may not be so obvious. For I try to do a great deal in this poetry. : The fluid and elastic qualities that underpin the expression of freedom have a different latitude from one mind to another. Indeed in this Faith there are “unique methods and channels”(1) for the exercise and maintenance of freedom. The very meaning of freedom has been deepened, its scope extended. The very fact that my writing poetry, an expression of art, is elevated to an act of worship augers well for the “enormous prospects for a new birth of expression in the civilization anticipated by His World Order.”(2) : Much, if not virtually all, of my poetry is about personal experience, a personal view of some sociological or historical process or fact. I see this poetry as essentially lyrical, as capable of expressing a sense of commonality and, for me, unparalleled intimacy. Some of what I write could be termed confessional. The first person “I” is vulnerable, dealing as it does with varying degrees of self-revelation. But even in the second and third persons there is the poet’s view, less direct, self-revelation less obvious. The poetry is self-serving; the reader is invited to share in my experience, in my thoughts. The poetry also serves the community, however self-focussed my poems are, and they all are to some extent. They deal with the universal and with the growth and development of that universal Force and Cause behind these poems. They deal with community. And the quest for community, it would seem, has always involved some conflict, some anxiety. : I strive, of course, for moderation, refinement, tact and wisdom in any of my poetic expressions of human utterance. But for everything there is a season. Thusfar, the season of my poetic writing in public has been minimal. I have been quite happy that the public utterance of my poetry, at poetry readings, has been minimal. I have written about this before in the five interviews recorded in previous booklets of poetry. Baha’u’llah, Himself, reinforces this idea in the maxim that: Not everything that a man knoweth can be disclosed...nor can every timely utterance be considered as suited to the ears of the hearer.” As the Universal House of Justice says in its expatiation on the theme of speech and freedom “an acute exercise of judgement” is called for. Perhaps when, and if, I become “public property” I will have acquired more of that quality of acute judgement. : The freedom of the poet to declare his conscience and set forth his views is at the root of the foundation of this Order, but poetry of a negative quality should be strictly avoided to prevent confusion and discord reigning in community life and to remedy divisiveness. The process of criticism is baneful in its effect and, therefore, the nature of my poetry is intended to counteract dissidence which I see as “a moral and intellectual contradition of the main objective animating”(3) my words. But often what I write is simply ordinary speech, sometimes emotionally loaded, raised to a high level, the highest level I can, of expressiveness. I strive for what the Greeks called kairos: tact, discretion, prudent restraint, maturity, for the quality the poet Pindar expressed.(4) For humanity today needs that communitas communitatum and this Faith, the Baha’i Faith, has an important role to play in this unifying process. This poetry is part of that wider process, that wider phenomenon. : I seek a judicious exercise in my writing. I try to be sensitive to content, style, sound, tact, wisdom, timeliness in order to “give birth to an etiquette of expression”(5) worthy of that term 'maturity', which Pindar possessed, and which this age must strive to attain. There must be a discipline here in this poetry if it is to attain the status of being a “dynamic power in the arteries of life.”(6) If my words are to attain “the influence of spring" and cause "hearts to become fresh and verdant”, they shall have to be seen as “acceptable to fair-minded souls.”(7) I can not make such a claim of my poetry, yet. : I am sensitive to my poetry's tenderness, as I am to the tenderness of the Cause which motivates so much that underpins my poetry. The rigorous discipline that must be exerted when putting print before the public eye, I have not exerted, not entirely. For I have thought that, for the most part, the public will not see most of my poetry, at least for some time to come. But I strive to speak the words of both myself and my fellow human beings as part of a whole; this autobiography serves the whole. It resonates in the immediate and the concrete, in the inner and the outer values of our lives, or in some socio-historical framework. However idiosyncratic and autobiographical a particular poem may appear it is related to the totality, the cosmic, the grand-scale, the great system of time and place. For mine is the poetry of a metanarrative. Hopefully different readers will be cheered or saddened in different ways as my poems drift through diverse human situations. : Spontaneity, initiative and diversity must be encouraged, but everything in its time, the right time under heaven, so to speak. The individual in this Cause is “the focus of primary development”(8), but within the context of the group; for the individual is essentially subordinated to the group. The individual should be seen as a source of social good. This is his most supreme delight. This is the essential context for poetry. When, and if, this occurs my poetry will find its right and proper place in community life. Dealing as my poetry does with the fragile, confused and ever to be rediscovered and redefined self, the place of the inner life and private character, the delight to which I refer will, hopefully, be connected with understanding, with intellect and wisdom, the two most luminous lights in the world of creation.(9) : Ron Price : 28 November 1997 : ** The last booklet I sent to the BWCL was called The Art of Glorification. For the period 9 January to 4 September 1997 I sent no poetry. The developments on Mt. Carmel are like a lodestone to human hearts. I continue sending my poetry as an expression of the intense attraction of the heart. 1,2,3,5,6, 7 and 8: all of these references are found in the letter from the Universal House of Justice to the followers of Baha’u’llah in the United States of America, 29 December 1988. 4. Joan Aleshire, “Staying News: A Defense of the Lyric”, Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World, editors, Gregory Orr and Ellen B. Voigt, University of Michigan Press, 1966, pp. 28-47. 9. ‘Abdu’l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, USA, 1970, p.1. : AUTOBIOGRAPHY: thoughts on..... : I have provided a succinct narrative account of my life. It is chronological; the factual material is ordered, sequential. But, clearly, sharpness of detail, revealing anecdote, even suspense and thinking of motivation are given with insight and style much more effectively in my poetry. There is so much poetry now, some 4000 poems spread over at least 2000 pages, that this collected and compendious body of material, if it is ever to provide a basis for biography in the future, must be shaped, interpreted, given perspective, dimension, a point of view. : Such a biographer must provide the creative, the fertile, the suggestive and engendering fact, an imaginative, a referential dimension. Such a thinker must enact a character, a place, a time in history. He will do this through language, through imposing a formal coherency on my material, although inevitably there will be present the incurable illogicalities of life, as Robert Louis Stevenson called the inconsistent, the unresolved paradoxes of life. He will give the reader a portrait not an inventory. This is what any biographer must do. I do this in my autobiographical poetry. But I provide many pictures, many moods, many sides. Details balloon; they repeat; they illuminate. I discover things about my life, but I do not invent them. : As Plutarch and Boswell, two of history's most famous biographers, demonstrated: "anecdote rather than history teaches us more about the subject."1 I see my narrative as the home of history and my poetry as a source of rich anecdote. It was for this reason I turned to poetry as a reservoire of autobiography; it seemed to teach, to convey, much more than narrative. Claude Levi-Strauss helps us to understand why several poems about one object, or person, provide more significance or meaning than a narrative when he writes: : To understand a real object in its totality we always tend to work from its parts. : The resistance it offers us is overcome by dividing it...Being smaller, the object as : a whole seems less formidable....it seems to us qualitatively simplified.2 : : One can not know everything about anyone, even oneself. The mountain of detail would sink a ship and would not enlighten anyone. The task of achieving comprehensiveness not only is impossible, it is irrelevant. But there are intelligible dimensions of one's life and it is these dimensions that my poetry deals with best. Imagination is critical in writing biography. Some writers see invention more important than knowledge. Inevitably, there is an element of invention, of moving beyond the factual, but my own preference is to use imagination in a framework of factual experience, as far as possible. To read my poetry should be to immerse oneself in the first several decades of Baha'i experience in what the Baha'is see as 'the tenth stage of history' and, especially, that time when the spiritual and administrative centre on Mt. Carmel received its richest, its definitive, elaboration and definition. There are several unifying nodes of experience for my poetry, in addition to the above. I have drawn them to the reader's attention from time to time in the introductions to some of my poems. : From a Baha'i perspective my poetry will undoubtedly possess a moral appeal involved with overcoming hardship, a quality that characterized most 19th century biography. But the moral framework, while retaining a certain simplicity, is expressed in a portait of complexity, refinement, mystery, a slumbering world, my own idle fancies and vain imaginings and the streaming utterance of a new Revelation. : : Freud commented that biographers choose their subjects 'for personal reasons of their own emotional life.' 3 I'm sure this is equally, if not more, true of autobiograhers. After criss-crossing Australia as an international pioneer and teaching in the northernmost and southernmost places in Canada-all of this over thirty-six years, I have watched this emerging world religion grow perhaps 15 times. I have taught in schools for nearly thirty years and feel a certain fatigue. I must write this poetry for the same reason a foetus must gestate for nine months. I feel, with Rilke, a great inner solitude and that my life and history is itself a beginning, for me, for my religion and for the world. I want to get all the sweetness out of everything and tell the story. : I sigh a deep-dark melancholy but keep it in as far as I am able. I am lonely and attentive in this sadness. My poetry gives expression to this process and to my destiny which comes from within. My poetry is the story of what happens to me. For the most part "life happens" and one must respond to the seemingly inevitability of it all, although the question of freedom and determinism is really quite complex. Reality, I record in my poetry, comes to me slowly, infinitely slowly. My poetry records this process. My poetry is an expression of a fruit that has been ripening within me: obscure, deep, mysterious. After years it now comes out in a continuous preoccupation as if I have, at last, found some hidden springs. It is as if I have been playing around the edges, with trivia, with surface. Finally something real, true, is around me. I stick to my work. I have a quiet confidence, a patience, a distance from a work that always occupies me. And so I can record a deep record of my time. I am preparing something both visible and invisible, something fundamental. : Ron Price : 25 September 1998 : : : 1Ira Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1984, p.60. : 2idem : 3 ibid, p.122. : SEGMENTS FROM INTERVIEWS : INTERVIEWER(I): : Carlyle, the British historian, says that no great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men. What are your views on this concept? : PRICE(P): : One can not ignore the role of great men and great women but, if anything, this poetry is a testimony to the contribution of the not-so-great. One of the poems in this collection, a collection I have entitled Cascading Down after “15 small pools of water in the centre of the two sets of stairs leading from the Entrance Plaza to Terrace one.”(Baha’i Canada, Baha, BE 156, p.5), answers this question in part. I refer you to that poem: “At Speed and in the Darkness Before the Dawn” in which I have drawn heavily on J. Harrison’s book The Common People. Obviously, Baha’i history has great souls. Our history is a story to them; but it is also a history of the ordinarily ordinary and a greatness that comes from the humble and the unrecognised. This poetry is as much a tribute to this latter category, as the former. I see myself, in some ways, as a symbol of the ordinary. : I: Is there much in your poetry about your family history and its relationship with the Cause? : P: The first two poems in the collection of poetry I sent to the World Centre were written in the first week of September 1992. They were addressed to my mother who died in 1978. She started investigating the Baha’i Faith in 1953. One of the poems in this collection was inspired by my grandfather’s autobiography, A.J. Cornfield’s Story, about his early life from 1872 to 1901. I refer you to this poem: “1953: A Turning Point in History” to partly answer this question. There are, of course, many other poems that involve my family history. It is impossible to separate family history from one’s autobiography, whether that autobiography is poetic narrative or simple narrative prose. I know nothing at all of my family history before 1872 and so, as yet, there is no poetry about it. Something may come up that is based on history in Wales, England and France. Time will tell. We could hold a separate interview on the influences of family; I have referred to some of them in the first eleven interviews. But I think this is enough for now. : I: Have you written many poems about specific contemporary events in the political, social, economic and historical worlds? : P: Only very occasionally. I think there are a number of complex interacting factors that, for various reasons, make writing poetry about “the news” difficult. There is something about “the news” that has an air of fantasy, of make-believe, about it. There is also the problem of making sense of the recent past. Kosovo or East Timor are good examples, to chose two from a potential multitude. You really have to give the issue a great deal of time to unravel the complexity. There is just so much going on that the mind is on overload. Getting a precise knowledge seems just about impossible except for the specialist. There is no cultural or ancient consensus any more and there hasn’t been, perhaps since the beginning of the Formative Age in 1921, perhaps since the 1950’s and the onset of postmodernism; so what the individual gets is an enormous plethora of opinions, a pastiche, incoherence, with little sense of overview. As the French sociologist/philosopher Jean Baudrillard puts it: it has became very difficult to plot reality, or even get a sense of who you are. Any poems I do write in this area of social study tends to be ‘big picture’, ‘whole culture’, ‘wide angle’ stuff. : I: I understand you have just retired from teaching. What is the experience like thusfar? : P: Yes I’ve had over six weeks thusfar, what you might call the honeymoon period of retirement. The first thing I notice is that I’ve slowed down. I wrote a poem this morning about the hibiscus(see the enclosed poem: ‘Flame Out’). The poem would not have been written at normal times because I needed to be in low gear, enough to stop and have a good look, especially standing out in the rain trying to write the poem. I get a good forty minutes of brisk walking in every day. I’ve never been able to do that before. I’m also getting to know my wife again after years of running past her on my way to work, meetings, or something that I had to do. We are also getting ready to move to Tasmania so I’m useful around the house in preparation for the departure. : I: Spike Milligan says his father said that he would rather tell him stories about himself that were exciting but a lie, than tell him stories that were boring but true. For some of us the incurable romantic never dies. Is there any of this romanticism in your poetry? : P: My mother used to say to me, I remember, back in the early 1960s before I went pioneering, that the Baha’i Faith was a good religion for me because of the strong element of the theatre in its framework of activities. The social dimension of life inevitably involves a certain theatricality. As I said, too, in my introduction to Roger White’s Occasions of Grace there is in the Baha’i ethos, at least there is for me, a stong element of the cry of all Romantic artists since the industrial revolution: I don’t want comfort; I want God; I want poetry; I want real danger; I want freedom; I want goodness; I want sin. Well, I’m not so sure about the real danger any more and I do like my bourgeois comforts. So I suppose I’m just a part Romantic on these terms. : I: How are your ideas born, where does the energy come from and how do they develop into poems? Do you know what you’re doing? Are you perfectly secure in your writing? : P: Ideas for poetry are born of intuition, there’s a lightness right at the start, a quickness, a feeling of “connection, of yes, of aha, there’s something here, this is good, I like this.” The poem is an effort at taking these feelings, this brightness and giving it form, development, substance, more than the airy-nothing, the vagueness, the potentiality which it is at that starting point and which it will be, if I don’t work on it and give it shape. : The energy comes from books, from experiences, from being in a room alone and being with others in social situations. Ideas come in a myriad of ways. The poem becomes a stopping point in my journey, a brief visible moment, a resting place in that same journey, a sustained note, a punctuation mark, a point I can look back on later in life in quite a different way than the normal memory trip. The whole exercise of writing the poem is usually quite spontaneous, quite fast, although on occasion the poem takes two or three hours to take form. : I feel a strong sense that I know what I am doing. I also have an equally strong sense of security. With each poem, or group of poems, I define the process more sharply, more definitively, more comprehensive- ly. In writing poems I pay a lot of attention to what I am doing, to giving the process a description. I would say, looking back over what must be at least two million words now, that there is an ongoing poetic study of process, of content, of relationships between what I am doing and both myself, my Faith and my society which are the three corners of the geometric triangle that is my poetry. The sense of security is not arrogance, superiority, or self-righteousness. It is a composite feeling that is firstly inspired by my religious commitment, the faith that is built on this commitment, something that is reflected in all the appropriate protocols of piety I know as a faithful petitioner and practitioner. It is also a feeling that also takes me out to sea, with my spirit wrung, with remorse on my wings, with an open wet world beyond which I do not always approach with courage, often with sadness, for I am aware of my cowardice, for I am human. : I: Would you go so far as to see your own life as your poetry? : P: Yes, I often feel I am the path which is outlined in my poetry. It is a line of movement between the many places I have travelled, the many experiences I have had. It is a path, a line, conditioned by my thoughts, feelings, indeed everything that has happened to me. Not all of it is down on paper, but what is not there will disappear into oblivion and be no more, eventually. What is there is my line; I walk my line. We all walk our own line; it is the easiest thing a human being can do to put our mark on a place—and the hardest! My words have a substantive actuality about them for my poems are autobiographical and I bring my society and my Faith into relation with my self. I don’t do this in all my poems but many of them I do. : Every work of art, every poem, has its own mysterious sense of purpose about it, except for the works of those, I suppose, who see their work as devoid of purpose. This purpose comes partly from the traces of energy used in the making of the work. There is an energy connected with the spiritual path as defined in the Baha’i teachings. There is an energy in aloneness and its simplicity. Purpose is also connected with a withdrawal of energy and its defining, delimiting, function. Purpose also comes from the viewer’s own inner journey in relation to mine, to me, the provider of the poetry. I try to keep all channels of sensitivity open, to experience things as keenly and immediately as possible and to explore as deeply into reality as I can. My poetry, in the end, should be a conveyor of this feeling ; for, as Pound once said, only emotion endures. : I: Tell us a little about some of your thoughts on poetry. : P: Writing poetry is like finding your place in a room, in a group, on a street, in a town, in a state, in a country, in the world. Finding your place, bringing the physical things around you into the right, the most suitable, relationship. The process is dynamic; so is the process of writing poetry. You have to find the right set of words and when you find it, you move on to another poem, to another part of life. It’s like making everything your friend, making it familiar, even when you’ve never seen it before. You do the same with people, so you are comfortable wherever you go in the world, as long as you’re not freezing or roasting. The process of writing poetry is a poeticizing of your world, of a translation of the familiarization and the estrangement, yes, estrangement, because you can’t win it all. You are going to hurt, be hurt, feel alone, afraid, joyful, et cetera. : I: Do you always feel happy when writing poetry? : P: Most of the time is is an exercise in concentrated pleasure. Effort, my life, my world, come together in a pleasing mix. This is what keeps me at it day after day, year after year. Also, by the time I had started writing poetry seriously, I was tired of a lot of things in life. Poetry was clearly a new lease on life. I’m happy and relaxed when I write; occasion- ally, when something has got under my skin and I’m feeling sad, despondent, unhappy, or whatever, writing poetry is like a conduit for this negativity. I usually work it out, like someone else might do a physical workout. I do it also because it has deep meaning to me; the most profound, sublime feelings come to me when I work in the privacy of my chamber. I hope this sublimity comes through to the reader. : TWO POEMS :

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